**I’ll be at my brother’s wedding festivities this weekend, so no blogging from me for the next few days. We’ll return to our regular scheduled programming on Monday. The post below is a golden oldie from last year. Despite my efforts to pretend my family had the beach to ourselves, the burst of laughter from [...]
Posts under ‘Mexico’
A Movie Trailer for Your Next Trip to Mexico
One of the speakers at TBEX 10 last weekend was Kelley Ferro of TripFilms, a YouTube-like website that is exclusively devoted to vacation videos. The site features thousands of videos with travel pointers. Many of them are shot in Latin American countries such as Buenos Aires or Mexico. The videos can be a bit amatuerish [...]
Seven Surprising Facts About Latin America
Below are seven quirky facts about countries in Central and South America. (Two of the entries were suggested by a Latin America Fanatico via Twitter). Venezuela adopted its own time zone in 2007. The time the country adheres to is 4.5 hours behind GMT. Before the change in 2007, Venezuela was 4 hours behind GMT. [...]
The Currency of Trust in Latin America
After a long day of traveling, my family and I arrived at our hotel in Guadalajara, Mexico. But our reservation was not in the hotel’s computer system. I pulled the print out of our reservation through Orbitz from my wallet, and the hotel clerk gave us a room. But he insisted on keeping my print [...]
Stretch, Dance, Eat at a Oaxaca Salsa Retreat
Like many good business ideas, Salsa Retreat is the brainchild of a talented person who was looking to fill a void: a vacation on which people could enjoy Salsa dancing and yoga in a scenic, relaxing atmosphere. By choosing to offer all of these things in Oaxaca, Mexico, Alice Kupcik –the founder of Salsa Retreat, [...]
Drum Beat of Bad News Continues in Mexico
The U.S. State Department’s most recent update to its Travel Alert for Mexico continues to emphasize that the country’s major resort areas or tourist destinations have not seen the level of violence that exists in the border regions and areas along the major drug trafficking routes. Since 2006, the alert notes, three times as many [...]
Public Leisure: Mexico’s Luxury That Eludes the U.S.
One of the hardest things to get used to in the U.S. is the loneliness, my friend told me at his party a few years ago. He had moved to Maryland from Mexico as a teenager. Happily married and successful in his career, he’s the picture of the American dream. I’ve met his parents, siblings, [...]
Anti-Immigrant Law Is Fueled by Misperception
Just before Arizona enacted its law aimed at giving law enforcement officials increased authority to verify people’s immigration status, the Fiscal Policy Institute issued a report contradicting some widely held perceptions about immigrants. It turns out that the typical immigrant isn’t the low skilled laborer in the food or construction industry. Rather, the FPI report [...]
Mexico Posts Weak Tourism Figures for 2010
The number of U.S. citizens traveling to Mexico by air so far this year is down compared with the same period last year, according to the U.S. International Trade Administration’s Office of Travel and Tourism Industries. In January, 2010, about 440,000 Americans took flights to Mexico. For the same month last year, it was about [...]
The Case for Extending Medicare to Mexico
Mexico and the U.S. are quietly working out an agreement under which the U.S. would expand Medicare benefits to cover health care in Mexico, according to a recent column by the Miami Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer’s column includes some interesting statistics: the nearly 1 million Americans living in Mexico is likely to increase to 5 [...]
